4. Edward Cocker (1631–1675), author of several arithmetical works, of poems and distichs, and of a number of quaintly titled books on calligraphy. DNB. When he was 16, “asham’d of my Ignorance in Figures,” BF took Cocker’s Arithmetic and went through the whole book “with great Ease.”

5. This prediction became part of the Franklin family tradition. BF’s sister Jane related it to Ezra Stiles in 1779. Franklin B. Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles (N.Y., 1901), II, 375–6.

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